It is known that routers, commonly used for layer 3 routing, can offer the opportunity to intermediately route packets to an out-of-box service in order for the out-of-box service to perform some higher layer or advanced service like, e.g., data compression, before routing the packets to their intended destination. As illustrated in FIG. 1, this type of out-of-box routing is provided in two directions, from A to B and back from B to A. For each direction, an opposite flow through out-of-box interfaces X and Y is configured. In this way, an inverse service can be applied to each direction, such as compression in the direction from A to B and decompression in the direction from B to A.
From WO 2006/000629, it is known that packets can be subjected to more than one out-of-box service on more than one out-of-box server by intermediately re-routing packets through an observation point and a number of action points, thereby passing through an out-of-box interface more than once. Thus, a number of intermediate re-routing actions is performed, out and into the router, which equals a number of out-of-box services to be performed.